Whether you use a Mac or a PC, let’s all wish Apple a happy birthday as it turns 40 years old on April 1st, 2016, and we can certainly say it has affect our lives for the better or worse,( but I’m an optimist, so I think they have made great innovations). They can claim items that failed (Newton) or succeeded (iPhone) during those years, and we can look forward to their next innovation in the years to come.

Today is World Backup Day. Data is an essential part of our modern lives with family photos on our smartphones (Less in hard copy formats – 4X6 printouts, etc.) to reviewing our bank statements (Miss the days of waiting for it to arrive in your mailbox?). Visit the World Backup Day website to learn more about it and take the pledge. Don’t wait for your hard drive to fail are you or your smartphone to damaged, before visiting the PC Mag to pick an online backup services from their list.

If you regularly connect to Wi-Fi at your local coffee shop or any other place outside of your home, than you should use a VPN service to protect your privacy. Review this list from to pick one and follow these tips from Norton/Symantec the next time you connect:

The BBC recently posted a report on some names, such as Null or Keihanaikukauakahihulihe’ ekahaunaele, which affect programs from bank software to driver licenses because they contain either too many characters or use a reserved word or keyword (null, bool, etc. depending on the programming language).

Individuals with those names often have to take a few more steps when opening a new bank account or apply for a driver’s license.

Fortunately, WC3 has opened a discussion about this topic for standardization.

Google has been adding encryption to its services since 2013 and aims to have 100% of its services encrypted for our privacy. One example is visiting their search engine and seeing the “https” in your URL address bar. Let’s see if this trend catches on with other tech companies.

Placing an ad on your site can generate some income and add content to your site, but it can expose your visitors to unrelated content or malicious ads.
An article recently describes how some big companies, such as The New York Times, the BBC, and MSN, were targeted by malicious ads that encrypted visitor’s computers until they bought a key to unlock it (ransomware).

There are plugins, such as AdBlocker, that will block a majority of ads and help protect you from unwanted content. It is one that I use and it’s very effective at removing ads.

Let’s all think take a moment, maybe 3.14 seconds to think about the impact of Pi on our lives from engineering automobiles to math lesson. You don’t need to be math geek or nerd to appreciate its impact.